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The days merged into one, each as laborious as the day before. I was sent on deliveries, some as heavy as would warrant a porter and his donkey, but Cavaldi would not hear of it; if I had been sent down for her to look after then it was my duty to earn my keep. I built quite a reputation amongst the porters in town, who ferried supplies up and down the steep alleys around the village. They called me Kid, alluding to my climbing skills as well as my age. It made me think of my mother. I was growing, at long last, and I noticed my muscles becoming more defined and strong. Sometimes the young boys would laugh at me for doing men’s jobs. The local women were not so kind. The Positanese knew mountain people when they saw them. We had the outside about us, the air of the wild, a fearlessness which I’m sure was disconcerting. We lived closer to death than they.
When I turned sixteen, Paolino, who till then had paid me as much attention and courtesy as one might their own shadow, began speaking to me. It started in the spring, as we placed the first harvest of citrus in the crates. I liked to arrange them in an attractive pile, but Cavaldi always admonished me for trying to make art not money. I had a large cedro in each hand, what Americans always mistook for grapefruit. He called out to me, ‘Watch how you hold those fruits, eh, Santina? You make a boy have bad thoughts!’ I looked at him, appalled, more for the fact that he had spoken directly to me than the inappropriate remark. I couldn’t find an answer. I longed for my mother right then, to whisper a fiery return, but none came. I was mute. I had been silenced for the past four years. The sudden realization stung. I considered lobbing the fruits at him but channelled a pretence of calm. My cheeks reddened, which I know he mistook for paltry modesty, or worse, encouragement, then I fled back into the shop.
I don’t know whether it was my nightly prayers, the incessant daydreams of life elsewhere, the relentless beckoning of my sea and its daily promise of potential escape, or the simple hand of fate, but three years later, on the afternoon of Friday, 25 May – venerdi, named after Venus, harbinger of love and tranquillity – two gentlemen entered my life and altered its course.
Mr Benn and Mr George were art dealers from London. They wore linen shirts in pastel shades, hid their eyes behind sunglasses and spoke without moving their mouths very much. Mr Benn was the smaller of the two and always held his head at a marginal incline, as if he were trying to hear a song passing on the breeze or decipher messages from the shape-shifting clouds above. Mr George was very tall and looked like he would do well to eat more pasta. His movements were slow and deliberate, his voice full of air. They admired the dancing shimmer of our emerald sea, the yellow of the mimosa tree outside Cavaldi’s store, and knew that cedro fruits were for making exquisite mostarda, a thick jelly sliced thin to accompany cheese. I was easily impressed in those days.
During their stay in Positano, they made daily trips to the store, and I was happy to serve them because they always stopped to stitch together a frayed conversation in their limited Italian. They tried to tell me a little about life in London, whilst touching every cherry before judging which ought to be included in their half kilo’s worth. Their words spun another world before me, crisp, colorful pictures of a life I craved. I listened as Mr Benn offered a steady commentary on what Mr George was well advised to buy. It was a wondrous thing for me to witness lives that could afford a month’s stay in a tiny Italian town. All sorts of fantasies seared my over-used imagination when I served them, underscored with a restlessness that pounded louder for each day I remained within Cavaldi’s prison-like walls.
Every morning they would stop by and ask what they ought to cook with the fresh zucchini, whether the flowers were better in risotto or fried? How long I’d char an eggplant for, and which olive oil would be best for sofritto – finely cut celery, onion and carrot – and which best for drizzling over finely chopped radicchio? I began to look forward to their visits, a beacon of beauty amidst the relentless purgatory of life with Cavaldi. The obvious pleasure they took in enjoying our food made me feel proud. Their enthusiasm about our tomatoes made me wonder whether us locals appreciated the miracle of our bounty, as well as what on earth London art dealers must eat throughout the year to make our simple groceries so compelling?
As we approached the end of June, I had shared most of the recipes I knew, and sometimes, part for folly, part for necessity – as my repertoire was running thin – I’d invent ideas on the spot, improvising appropriate vegetable pairings, hoping they might work in real life too. I remember them arriving at the store, and I prepared myself for a tour of the day’s deliveries. I’d been hatching a few ideas for light summery lunches that I had an inkling they’d enjoy, when they asked me something unrelated to anything we’d spoken about before: would I consider working for them in London in return for papers to America?
I will never forget that day. The way the sun bleached their white faces and lit up their pale yellow collars – they often wore the same shade. Their smiling faces are etched in my mind. Behind them, the ever-increasing surge of tourism strolled past the shop. I remember watching the crowd smudge into a sun-kissed blur, the feel of the cold, dark shop behind me, and that compelling stone path out of this town, away from this miserable life and the battleaxe for whom I would never be any more than a mountain-girl lackey. They must have known I would say yes before they’d even finished the invitation. Perhaps I ought to have asked more questions, known what would have been truly expected of me, but the craving for freedom, for air, was too powerful. I think if I’d been even bolder I might have thrown off my apron there and then and walked with them straight onto their ship from the Bay of Naples with nothing but my smock.
As it turned out, that was not so far from the truth. On 1 July 1956 I became part of the Neapolitan throng shuffling along the streets of London in search of gold.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_2362e960-71cc-5391-95c3-9f4544f029c8)
It took six weeks of the purgatorial British drizzle before I surrendered to my first bout of homesickness. At first, the terrifying otherness was the exhilaration of a splash of spring water on a hot day; the sounds of murmured clipped vowels; the way people’s hands stayed by their sides when they spoke. Young girls seemed to talk out the sides of their mouths, a string of incomprehensible sentences, each word looping onto the next, whirring out of what sounded like chewing gum-filled mouths. I wanted to be them. I wanted my hair pinned, curled and set. I wanted to walk down the street with my arm linked in my best friend’s, surefooted, heels that knew they belonged and where they were headed. But after just over a month of this giddy daydream, the stream of possible lives blurring before me offering heady futures just beyond my reach, reality hit. I had no one.
Mr Benn and Mr George had lost the laid-back sunshine swagger of their holiday. Back in North West London they had become different people. Or, rather, they had settled back into the lives they had paused. The gentlemen owned a large Georgian terraced home set a little way back from the main Heath Street that led into Hampstead. The bohemian suburb attracted a vibrant palette of artists, many of whom came to call at our house, each more peculiar than the previous. Mr Benn and Mr George ran an art gallery on one of the back streets behind Piccadilly. I navigated my way there on my first day off. I stood upon the wooden slats of the tube carriage of the Bakerloo line, turning in a pitiful performance of confidence. Truth was, I could barely read the map in time to work out which stop was mine, so thick was the tiny carriage of others’ cigarette smoke. It reminded me of my father.
When I did arrive I was too embarrassed to step inside. I remained on the pavement, ignoring the rain. I stared at the painting in the window. Giant swirls of yellow with flecks of turquoise stuck to the canvas in stubborn blobs. Angry spurts of red protested across the central spiral. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Nothing before me could, in my opinion, be judged as art, yet the image was intimidating in the compelling way it hooked my gaze. The artist and frame had had a fight, and I couldn’t decide who had won.
I left the stalemate and found a tiny booth in the sweaty New Piccadilly Café, sandwiched between the Piccadilly Theatre and a number of salubrious shop fronts. It was hard to decipher the goods on offer, but I had a hunch it had a lot to do with the young women huddled nearby.
It took me a couple of minutes to realize that I had understood every word of what the proprietor had said to the waitress. Before I congratulated myself on my progress in English it dawned on me that the dialect I had tuned in to was Neapolitan.
‘Signori – you from the old country, si?’
I looked up at the man, unsure of what my answer ought to be. ‘Positano.’
‘I know a Napoletana when I see one!’
He scooted around the counter, leaving the blaze of short order cooks whipping up omelettes behind him.
‘You’re not long here, am I right, signorina?’
I had an inkling to suggest that I’d never met a Neapolitan man who ever thought he wasn’t right about anything, but thought better of it.
‘You working? Lavori?’
‘Yes,’ I began, realizing how much I’d cherished my anonymity until this interrogation, how the incessant Positanese prying was very much part of my past not present, ‘for two gentlemen. In Hampstead.’
His eyebrows raised and his head tilted.
‘Hey, Carla!’ he yelled over to the waitress zipping between tables with egg-smeared plates balanced just the right side of equilibrium. ‘This signorina is up with the Hampstead crowd! Not one gentleman! Two! Not bad for a fishing village girl, no?’
I was back on my narrow streets, gossip climbing cobbles. I took a breath to speak without knowing what I wanted to say. He quashed my indecision before I could. ‘Listen, if it doesn’t work out with the Lords up there, you call me, si? Wait – two men you say? Together in one house? Brothers?’
I shook my head. His eyebrows furrowed. I wasn’t convinced that he didn’t mutter something to the Virgin Mary and the saints.
‘I always have work for a paesan.’ I didn’t want to be a paesan. I wanted to be a Londoner. ‘This Soho,’ he continued, twiddling his fingers in the air like someone sprinkling Parmigiano, ‘this patch belongs to us Italiani. Out there we’re immigrants. But in Soho we help each other – capisce?’
I nodded, but I didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to.
I tried to let go of the vague sense that his approach was more of an offensive than a welcome. Wisdom, and scrawled number on limp paper imparted, he turned and walked across the café, waving sing-song arms at an English couple who were sat at another Formica booth, dipping their rectangular strips of toast into soft-boiled eggs. I took a final sip and left, all remnants of homesickness hanging in the sweaty tea-smudged air of that café.
My attic room is etched in my memory. It was clean and simple. My routine was described to me in great detail and it didn’t take me long to adjust to the gentlemen’s habits, which, it would seem, never altered independent of the day. To her credit, Signora Cavaldi’s terse grip had stood me in fine stead for London life.
I hadn’t meant to, nor planned to, but on my sixth visit to the police station the first cracks appeared. Small but prominent fissures. I was the tenth in line to have my Certificate of Registration stamped. I held it in my hand, trying to not let my nerves crease it too much. At the top was my number: 096818. And below the words: ALIENS ORDER 1956. Every other visit, I had felt like it would only be a matter of time until I would no longer be alien; I would belong, click into the puzzle, be that final missing piece. But that day, as the drizzle left a damp trail on my hair like half-dried tears, I felt the sting of being the outsider. It was the first time I’d noticed the sideways glances of the people going about their regular days. Or perhaps they had always looked at us like that. I was used to being alone, I told myself. Life here was a world better than the one I’d left behind. I almost convinced myself.
Autumn and winter trundled by, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Mr Benn and Mr George were not impressed by my work. There was nothing major I could pinpoint about the shift in our day to day lives. A wave of frustration drew in, a little snatched remark here, an almost imperceptible roll of the eye; the toast being over-done, under-done, too early, not early enough. The minutiae of small failures tripped into an impressive collection, the way insignificant disappointments ferment into resentment between lovers till they can no longer bear to be together but cannot define exactly what pressure has pushed them apart. All three of us knew that I would not be working there much longer.
One morning in early May, the bell rang of a Saturday afternoon, a surprising sun casting boastful rays across the black and white tiles of the wide hallway, as if it too had joined in to celebrate my imminent termination of employment. I knew it would be my final weekend here, and I would, against my better judgement, give the owner of New Piccadilly Café a call after all. I turned the latch and opened the door.
Upon the step stood a man and a woman. She had a mane of strawberry blonde locks cascading in defiant curls past her shoulders. They bounced over the deep purple of her full-length woollen cardigan. Her long red chiffon slip beneath danced on the spring breeze by her bare feet, slipped into simple roman sandals. His beard was a thing to behold, waves of thick blond tuft with streaks of red. A wide-brimmed leather hat perched on his head at an angle. His heavy leather boots stamped a few times upon the mat, scraping off imaginary snow or the memory of yet another wet day. At once they reminded me of the painting in the window. Only this splash of color and verve came with its very own halo surround, courtesy of the bitter white sun.
I noticed I was staring just before they did, and stepped aside to let them in. The woman flashed me a wide smile, flicked the hair off her face and removed her shoes, before floating into the front room where Mr Benn had insisted I light a fire. She wrapped her arms around him, and I pretended not to notice when she kissed him on the lips and sat on his knee. So did the gentleman who accompanied her. He, rather, shook Mr George’s hand, who then nodded for me to open the wine.
I filled four glasses with prosecco and handed them out. Mr Benn and Mr George carried on talking. The man and the woman thanked me. I returned to the tray and lifted the small bowl of nuts Mr Benn had asked me to prepare. As I placed them upon the low table before the fire the woman reached out her hand. ‘Santina, aren’t you?’
I nodded, wanting to avoid conversation.
‘Henry,’ she began, turning to the man who had accompanied her, ‘this is Santina, darling. Oh she’s a pip. You’re like a Mediterranean stroll in the sun – you know you’ve found a beauty, don’t you, boys?’
Mr Benn and Mr George smiled, one lip each.
‘Santina, it’s a pleasure,’ she continued, whilst I squirmed. ‘We’ve heard a great deal about you. How exquisite to have a slice of Positano right here in North West London. Henry, darling, it fills me with a great deal of hope. It’s like a ray of sun through the fog.’
‘That’ll be the morning sun actually doing what it’s compelled to do,’ he answered, ‘quite naturally.’
The woman rolled her eyes and jumped up from Mr Benn’s lap.
‘Quite right – I’m not thinking straight at all – thank God for that! Who’d live a life through logic’s narrow lens, for crying out loud?’
‘I’ll drink to that!’ cried Mr George, and the four of them stood and clinked.
‘Go easy with the wine, Adeline,’ replied Henry, who I assumed was her husband. Though in this house, when guests appeared, it wasn’t always clear who belonged to whom. The boundaries I had become accustomed to back home were the suffused haze after a spring shower.
The woman’s hand slipped down to her abdomen. ‘Good heavens, I almost forgot! Yes, we’ve got some marvellous news, haven’t we?’
‘Indeed,’ Henry replied, catching my eye as he did so.
‘I shall be creating more than paintings this year, gentlemen!’ she cried, flinging her arms up at such a speed that she almost lost half the contents of her glass onto the Persian rug under-foot. ‘I am now producing humans also!’
It was hard to follow the conversation with accuracy, especially since I hadn’t been allowed into or out of it. I could understand that the willowy figure before me was pregnant. As she stood up it became so obvious that I wondered how I hadn’t noticed before.
‘Congratulations, Mr and Mrs Crabtree!’ cried Mr George.
‘That’ll be all, Santina,’ Mr Benn said, with an unnecessary hand wave, adding to all the other spoken and unspoken gestures tracing my paper-cut scars.
I shut the door behind me and went upstairs to pack.
The next morning Mr Benn and Mr George called me to the back parlor. I found Mr Benn by his grand piano, looking out toward the glass doors that led to their garden. He was puffing on a thin cigar. The smoke reached me in sorrowful swirls.
‘Santina, my dear. It will come as somewhat of a surprise, to me more than anyone, that we can no longer offer you employment.’
I gave a mute nod, unsure whether to express regret or surprise. Neither surfaced as it happened.
‘However, there are others in our circle who are more than willing to welcome you into their home and have you offer the tireless support you have given us, up till now.’
I glanced over at Mr George, but he was looking off toward an invisible horizon behind me.
‘Mr and Mrs Crabtree are keen for you to start with them right away. The Major, for that is how you must address him from now on, has assured me that he will, like us, arrange your papers for America after your first year.’
He left a pause here, which I knew he expected me to fill with grateful acceptance. I was happy that we were parting company with relative grace. Or, if not grace, at the very least that smooth veneer of some such, which I had intuited was an impeccable British habit. That evening they walked me down the hill toward the heart of Hampstead village to my new home.
Adeline and the Major’s house snuck into a slice of land between larger old brick homes at the convergence of two narrow lanes. Its layout was more warren than house, with low-ceilinged rooms leading onto one another in a maze of unexpected connections. Tudor beams hung crooked with age. Persian rugs overlapped one another in most of the rooms. A huge hearth stood in the main living room flanked by two sofas of different shades of velveteen violet. There were masks upon the wall, Indian gods and goddesses forever mid-chase, flaunting their half-clothed bodies or leering at the spectator. I’m ashamed to admit that I avoided looking at the one which hung by my bedroom door, so full were its wooden carved eyes of malice. Its pupils were painted red and black, and hair hung in sad curls, almost touching the wooden floorboards below.
At the far end of the house, squeezed in along one length of the courtyard garden, was Adeline’s studio. Small glass panes lined the upper section along the entirety of one side, letting in shafts of light from over the garden wall, which backed onto Christchurch Hill. The roof was formed of skylights, bathing the anarchic space in a wash of light. Several easels flanked the space, with unfinished canvases upon them, bright with moments of intense inspiration or drying paint. The floor was speckled with memories of Adeline’s expressive explosions. Even in her condition, she would hide away for days at a time, refusing food and rest. It frustrated the Major a great deal, but I suspected that her artistic endeavors overtook both their lives with a ferocity neither could tame nor understand, both succumbing to its seduction with varying degrees of resistance.
Adeline acquiesced to her imagination with abandon. I caught her once, as I headed to the Major in his study with a laden tray, through the gap between the open door and the frame. She was barefoot, which was not surprising; her feet reacted to any covering as an affront to their liberty. Her white smock hung creased about her, the growing roundness of abdomen catching the light as she swayed, a plump moon. Her fingers were splattered and quick, letting the brush lead them in muscular strokes. But it was her face that captured my attention. Her eyes were bright, the auburn flecks crisscrossing the blue even more visible in this light; shards of intense concentration. Her head was cocked to the side. If I didn’t know better, I would have said she were listening to something, music perhaps, a voice even. I was spying on an intimate conversation. My eyes drifted to the canvas. I would have recognized that spiral anywhere. This was the artist whose work had captured my attention all those months ago in Mr Benn’s gallery. It was beautiful. Bristles of guilt iced up my arm. I headed on to the study.
The Major’s hideaway smelled like the rest of the house, a compost of dusty books, sandalwood incense and fresh flowers. He tamed the roses in their garden with intricate care and took cuttings most mornings when they were in full scent. A huge grandfather clock etched us toward the future in somber swings. His desk faced the large sash window, each framed pane offering a concise version of his beloved garden. Books lined the walls on heavy carved mahogany shelves. Stacks mushroomed in each corner, a literary metropolis. Upon the tired green leather top was a correspondence organizer which never seemed to empty, and beside this, his pot of ink, into which he dipped between sentences as his pen scratched along his fine paper. I had gleaned that his time in the army had come to an enforced end and his hours spent in his room related to investment work of some sort. Adeline had rambled through their brief history, but she skated details and my English didn’t equip me to understand all I needed to. She also painted her own background with broad brushstrokes, a snipe at the end of sentences about her estranged family whose aristocratic wealth and abundance stood in stark contrast to the contempt they held for the artistic life she had chosen, even if the Major was able to almost keep her in the manner they expected.
I stood for a moment before the clatter of the tray made him turn to me.
‘Sorry, Major – I do not disturb you? Here’s your four o’clock tea as you asked.’
‘Ah yes, grazie, Santina.’
He whipped straight back to his writing. The smoky steam swirled up from the narrow silver spout.
‘Lapsang souchong, yes? You remembered?’ he asked without taking his eyes off his letter.
‘Yes,’ I answered, wondering how he could drink something that smelled like a bonfire.
‘That’ll be all.’
I left and closed the heavy squat door behind me.
The remaining months of Adeline’s pregnancy ripened throughout the summer. As the days lengthened so did her energy. Several times I’d walk past the studio door, finishing up my chores of the evening, only to notice the lights still on and the soft smudge of a brush dipping into paint and caressing the canvas. I’d listen to the quickening strokes, wondering whether this infinite burst of energy was healthy. The next morning – I think she can’t have slept more than a handful of hours – she declared that we were to visit the ladies pond in the heath. I almost dropped her egg as she did so. Then I caught the Major’s eyebrow rise up and lower over the top of the newspaper.
‘Henry, don’t be tiresome. Now is the time to listen to my body. I’m listening. You’d do well to do the same. It needs water. A great deal of it. This morning.’
He let out a sigh. The corner of his paper flickered on the last whispered trace of it. I placed a silver rack of fresh toast at the center of their breakfast table and, as usual, pretended not to hear very much at all.
‘Adeline – you’re the size of a modest whale. What on earth do you hope to achieve by thrashing around in freezing waters in this condition?’
I scooped another spoon of marmalade into a small ramekin and set it beside the toast, spreading the sounds of their conversation into a distant periphery.
As I reached the door I heard my name and spun back toward them.
‘That’s settled then, yes, Santina?’
‘Pardon, Major?’
‘What I just said.’
He hated to repeat himself. I hated asking him to.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.’
Another sigh. Deeper this time. He flopped his napkin beside his plate.
‘After breakfast you’re to accompany my bride to the pond. If she will not be convinced to avoid the icy bathing, then so be it. If you are there you may offer assistance should she need it.’
I skipped through most of the key words as he spoke, but the thought of me standing at the water’s edge in charge of a heavily pregnant artist, who, to my mind, had never done a thing that anyone had ever insisted of her, sent cold trickles of fear down my neck.
I nodded, of course.
Adeline charged through the forest with long strides, ducking under low hanging branches, swinging her long limbs over stony patches. Her leather satchel lifted with each step, her towel draped over one shoulder, percussing her steps with a nonchalant swing. Meanwhile, I rambled behind her, walking eight steps to her three, tripping over unexpected stones, holes, muddy patches. I hated the feeling of being a stranger amongst this lush green. It reminded me of trekking light-footed amongst the mountainous wilderness of home. That was another life now. A twang of sorrow tugged. I ripped my attention away from the memories, feeling the prick of their thorns but tearing away, just as Adeline did with every bramble catch of her towel. The paths inched in again and led to a wooden gate. Adeline creaked it open and we followed the stony ridge. I could make out a jetty just beyond several oaks. As we turned, the glassy water opened up before us, shafts of morning light streaking through the branches of the trees that surrounded it. The bottle-green water lay still, save for tiny ripples left from itinerant dragonflies. The reflections of the surrounding leaves dappled the surface with forest greens, ochre, sienna and emerald, all crafted with exquisite perfection as in the hands of a skilled oil painter. I noticed I couldn’t move.
‘Yes, Santina – it is simply breathtaking. My very happy place. Come on!’
And with that, she reached down to the bottom of her shift and with one lithe movement lifted it clear off her body. She placed her hands on her naked hips. I wished my eyes weren’t settling on her breasts, paper-thin porcelain streaked with threads of blue, ready to nourish. In the last few days I had noticed her pregnant belly drop toward her pelvis. I knew her time was soon. Spidery thin pink lines streaked out from her belly button.
‘Have you ever seen a naked pregnant woman, Santina?’
I shook my head, feeling the heat of embarrassment color my cheeks.
‘Isn’t it wonderful and ghastly?’
I wished some words would come to my rescue rather than this mute stupidity.
‘That’s why I must simply come here today. If I feel any heavier I may never walk again. It is a horrid feeling. And amazing of course. Henry felt it kick last night. The little monster churned across my entire belly. I saw an elbow, I think.’
She spun toward the water, reached the end of the jetty, stepped off and disappeared. I’d like to think I didn’t hold my breath. I looked around for other bathers but none were to be found. I counted the seconds till she resurfaced, my chest tightening. Then her head rose with a spray of water. I sat down upon the jetty and watched her head bob over and under the green ripples, pretending that it didn’t look like the perfect thing I should like to be doing at this very moment.
A week later the baby came: small, pink and loud. Perhaps I was the only one who noticed Adeline not sleeping for those first three days. No one else seemed to pay any mind to her manic delight. The Major was transfixed with the babe. The midwife was cool and brusque. Adeline was a woman possessed with a frantic happiness. It made me feel uneasy. I watched her hold the tiny baby to her bare breast, sometimes not noticing when her nipple fell out of the babe’s mouth, or the wails as she flailed to re-attach. I heard the cries through the night. I wasn’t convinced they were those of a mother adjusting to her new reality.
On the fourth day we awoke to an almighty crash. I ran to my window. Down in the garden I saw that the roof of the Major’s beloved greenhouse had collapsed. Jagged panes were strewn around a body.
It was Adeline’s.
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_f49bd089-b808-52e0-9218-2e3d1eb03294)
